Hacker News Reader

> Do we want to punish and ostracize the guilty

Yup, that one.

> or do we want to minimize the occurrence of this behavior going forward?

False equivalence. I would imagine if VCs and investors get the message that if they hit on women they'll be fired, they'll stop doing it.

> I'm not trying to blame the women who try to use their sexuality to their advantage or even those that engage in consensual relationships with men in a position of power. But because those instances exist and these men have likely witnessed them personally, even if they're rare, they create the possibility in the minds of these men.

Okay, so to combat this "pathology", we'll say, "If you engage sexually with someone who approached you in a professional context, consensually or otherwise, you're fired". Seems easy enough, and that takes care of the problem.

> I would imagine if VCs and investors get the message that if they hit on women they'll be fired, they'll stop doing it.

You imagine wrong. Instead, they'll learn how to do it without getting caught. Lesson one comes from these incidents. Don't leave an electronic or paper trail. It's much less likely these women would have come forward if they hadn't had electronic records of chat sessions to back up their assertions.

If you only treat the symptoms of the problem, it will keep returning in different forms. You need to address the root of the problem and your over-simplified view of the issue will never allow you to do that.

In theory, there could be an intelligent psychological model that analyzes a male VC's brain and provides thoughtful suggestions to them to dissuade them from this behavior right before it occurs. While that's a nice thought, it's incredibly unrealistic.

The far more practical approach is to catch the bad guys over and over again, make examples of them and mete out punishment. That's how criminal deterrence works in every other field. No reason to make an exception here.

> Yup, that one.

So you're advocating for zero tolerence.

>> But because those instances exist and these men have likely witnessed them personally, even if they're rare, they create the possibility in the minds of these men

There was never any suggestion that any of the men in the article observed some woman "dating up" and as a consequence of that felt justified to grope or send inappropriate messages to the women in the article.

The men in the article themselves did not even try to portray their alleged actions as justifiable, or excuseable by association with any other past behaviour. They either admitted their behaviour was wrong or denied they ever behaved in this manner.

And yet, here you are relating a story about a woman you once saw "dating up" to try and explain those men's behaviour as something else than a simple mistake that should not be repeated.

How is this useful, exactly? In what way does it contribute, besides changing the subject and trying to shift the blame on the people who, in the article, were reportedly subjected to undeniably inappropriate behaviour?

> Everyone keeps mistaking my meaning.

This should tell you to stop and think about what you’re really saying.

No it shouldn't. What he is saying is just fine if people would take the time to actually read it.

It's not even that people are disagreeing, it's that they see a trigger word and stop reading, then launch into a straw man attack. I see that frequently in these "social justice" threads.

>> But because those instances exist and these men have likely witnessed them personally, even if they're rare, they create the possibility in the minds of these men

Btw, this does not compute. Those instances are "rare" but those men have "likely" witnessed them? When something is rare, most are unlikely to witness it.

Welcome to the law of large numbers. Winning the lottery is a rare event--more than one in a million. A hard drive failure is a rare event--most drives can have trillions of successful reads and writes before they fail. Yet we've all seen the people holding up those oversized checks and who among us has never had a hard drive fail on us?

These guys see hundreds of pitches. There's hundreds of VCs in the valley. Something can be rare--less than one in a hundred and still be likely. Rare for a single instance can be likely and expected across a large number of instances.

There's a bit of confusion here with "the law of large numbers". People do win the lottery, but because it's very rare, only very few people do so. Hard drives may fail if they remain in use over a very long time, but only a few drives will remain so.

Accordingly, the "law of large numbers" as you report it, means that either only a handful of those hundreds of VCs in SV have witnessed inappropriate pitch behaviour, or this inappropriate pitch behaviour is not rare.

Regardless of the exact quantities, it remains true that an event is either unlikely to be witnessed, or it is not rare. That an event will be witnessed even though it is rare doesn't mean that it will be witnessed often.

The law of large numbers doesn't say that rare things happen often, is what I'm saying. Because that would be an oxymoron, not a paradox (which that "law" is meant to illustrate).